Utopia

The History of an Idea

Gregory Claeys

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780500775271
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Aspirations for a better even a perfect society have existed throughout history, often imagined in intricate detail by philosophers, poets, social reformers, architects and artists. This book explores a perennially powerful idea: the quest for the ideal society. Gregory Claeys surveys the influence of the idea of Utopia on history. Central to his exploration of ideal worlds are creation myths; archetypes of heaven and the afterlife; new worlds and voyages of discovery; ages of revolution and technological progress; model communities and kibbutzim; political and ecological dystopias; space travel and science fiction. The most significant utopias throughout history whether envisaged or attempted are covered, including visions of the ideal society in the West as well as American, Asian, African and the Arab worlds. From classical times to the present day, this compelling book traces the enduring human need to imagine and construct ideal worlds.

CHAPTER 1

The Classical Age

MYTHS, GOLDEN AGES AND IDEAL CONSTITUTIONS

Much like nostalgia for one’s youth, many societies have creation myths that go hand-in-hand with the idea of a past golden age of purity, harmony and virtue. In Greece, Homer established this period as existing a thousand years before the Trojan War, when the first men were made of gold and were governed by the god Kronos. The idea was embellished by, among others, Hesiod (Works and Days, 8th century BC), who tells us:

…they lived like gods, with carefree heart, remote from toil and misery. Wretched old age did not affect them either, but with hands and feet ever unchanged they enjoyed themselves in feasting, beyond all ills, and they died as if overcome by sleep. All good things were theirs, and the grain-giving soil bore its fruits of its own accord in unstinted plenty, while they at their leisure harvested their fields in contentment amid abundance.¹

At this time the gods are generally portrayed as benevolent and as having a more direct relationship with mortals than is the case today. But the gods also punish human beings for betraying promises or agreements. For example, in Greek myth Zeus sends Pandora to Earth bearing a jar of miseries (including war, famine and sin), which are unleashed on humanity in punishment for Prometheus stealing fire from heaven.

According to Hesiod, the golden age is abandoned when the gods somewhat impulsively create a ‘much inferior’ silver race. Now the climate grows colder, food requires cultivation and humanity must shelter from the elements. When these people fail to honour the Olympian gods adequately, they too are supplanted – by a bronze race. This age is marked by growing human enmity, but is succeeded by a ‘more righteous and noble’ race of demi-gods, some of whom, after death, are permitted to dwell in the Isles of the Blessed. Next is the fifth or iron age, which is marked by warfare, greed, a breakdown in parental respect, and the spreading of envy and hatred. The gods intervene constantly to punish wickedness, and the pitting of good against evil comes to define human behaviour. The proto-utopia, once lost, is never regained, though the fault lies at least partly in the whimsy of the gods.

The Roman version of the golden age was taken up by Catullus, Horace, Seneca and Ovid, among others. It also portrays a state of harmony, abundance and peace, presided over by the god Saturn. Perhaps the most famous account of this age, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (AD 8), describes the gradual corruption of this state and the emergence of the silver, bronze and iron ages. To commemorate their loss the Romans invented the festival of Saturnalia, which re-created the golden age once a year (17–23 December). Slaves were permitted to dine with and speak freely to their masters, sometimes even ordering them to perform demeaning acts. Feasting, merry-making and a moratorium on harsh punishments took place. The Feast of Fools, or carnival, of the Middle Ages, was an imitation of Saturnalia and celebrated the theme of ‘the world turned upside down’.² This marks the first appearance of utopia as an act of (pseudo-) historic memory and re-creation.

Such utopic moments would become increasingly rare, however, and most aspirations for real improvement remained displaced to the afterlife. Elysium, the Elysian Fields or the Islands of the Blessed were the various names given to the land inhabited by the blessed throughout eternity. As described in Hesiod’s Works and Days and in Homer and Pindar, we envision a blissful land of beauty and abundance that is populated by heroic figures. For Hesiod, Hades was the home of dead souls, with a special dungeon, Tartarus, reserved for those who rebelled against the gods. For Plato, the immortality of the soul implied the possibility of eternal punishment, though he allowed that the soul might achieve benefits in the afterlife by worthy deeds in this one. In later Roman versions (notably Virgil’s Aeneid, c. 19 BC), the promise of health and eternal life is held out to all who have proven their moral worth, while manifold tortures await the unworthy below, as related by Aeneas. In Greek myth, Elysium was located variously in the Atlantic regions or closer to home; in Rome the Blessed Fields were a part of the underworld, or in a deep valley. Other lands also had their sacred places inhabited by the gods. Valhalla, the great hall of Odin, the supreme god in Norse mythology, is the final resting place of the bravest warriors; lesser mortals are received here, but then move on to another place, Niflheim, to pass eternity.

Around the 9th century BC Homer reported in the Odyssey the existence of the land of Aiaia, somewhere in the Mediterranean. Its only inhabitants were the sorceress Circe and her servants, whose visitors were often turned into wolves, lions and pigs. Homer also described Aiolio, the floating island of Aiolos Hippotades, king of the winds, whose six sons and daughters lived incestuously, and who gave selected visitors a bag of evil winds, which if opened would impede their return journey. Homer’s text also talks of the island of the Cyclops (one-eyed monsters that devour human flesh) as well as the Fortunate Islands, which welcome mortals and are inhabited by happy spirits; and in the land of the Lotus-Eaters, munching on lotus flowers causes worries to disappear and visitors to lose all desire to return home. In Lucian’s account (2nd century AD), the Island of the Blessed, located somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, was inhabited by bodiless, ethereal beings who lived in a capital made of gold, where the walls were of emerald and loaves of ready-made bread sprang from fields of wheat. Lucian also described Dionysus’s Island, in the same region, which possessed rivers of wine and grapevines that resembled the upper part of a woman’s body.

Atlantis was a powerful ancient archetype of the idealized society and was first described by Solon and Dionysius of Miletus. In the best-known account, Plato tells us that nine thousand years had elapsed since the great war between Athens and the kings of the island of Atlantis. Over 5,800 square miles (15,000 sq km) in size, the Atlantean nation was located somewhere beyond the Rock of Gibraltar. Its power as a prosperous empire threatened even Egypt and Greece until it was destroyed by a great earthquake that left just two parts of the country intact. Its capital, also called Atlantis, boasted great warehouses and strong defences. In later literary glosses, Atlantean science enabled the production of artificial food and drinks, and telepathy permitted the projection of past memories. The Atlantean myth of a lost island or continent has proven astonishingly enduring and gives a discernibly realistic sense of one source of the utopian ideal.³

The ancients also developed various other motifs that would come to be wedded to utopianism through the ages. Aristophanes’ The Birds (414 BC) is perhaps the best-known early farce or satire on Athenian imperial ambitions. Here, attempts to colonize Sicily are portrayed as Cloudcuckooland, depicted in part as a ‘city in the sky’ of birds, where vices such as hostility, violence and ambition have been banished. The epic voyage, which would become a key motif in utopian thought, included Virgil’s Aeneid. In this text part of Aeneas’s journey involves a visit to Hades, the underworld, and to Elysium, the paradise of heroes.

The tradition known as Arcadia, named after a region in the Greek Peloponnesus renowned for its supposed peacefulness, dates from a pastoral literature established as early as the 4th century BC in the work of Greek writers such as Theocritus. It was continued under Roman authors, including Ovid and Virgil, and was then reinvented in the form of an idealized rural idyll in the works of Iacopo Sannazzaro (L’Arcadia, 1501), Sir Philip Sidney (The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 1590) and others. Linked to images of the golden age, pastoral themes reappear frequently in utopianism throughout the subsequent period. In the early modern era they were sometimes associated with the reigns of particular monarchs, notably Elizabeth I, and were frequently taken up in dramatic form, as in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (c. 1599), set in the forest of Arden. Robin Hood-style myths of virtuous, forest-dwelling peasants overlap with the imagery of arcadian virtue, simplicity, and antagonism to courtly pretentiousness and hypocrisy. Arcadian visions were, like many forms of monasticism and mysticism, often linked to ascetic or want-denying ideals of moral purification. While some images of medieval peasant life promote want-indulgence, or cornucopia, as in the land of Cockaygne, the renunciation of urban society is often portrayed as a return to rural primitivism, with morals becoming purified proportionately as needs are simplified.

The ancient world also created a variety of constitutional forms that were later regarded as ‘ideal’ in terms of social and economic stability, the division of land, the distribution of wealth, laws, manners and social relations. These would become one of the most direct sources for the ‘realist’ strand in utopian thought by the time Thomas More’s Utopia appeared. Sparta, and to a degree Crete, would come to exemplify, in later ages, a contempt for luxury and an intense devotion to the common good of the city-state. As recounted by Plutarch (c. AD 100), Lycurgus was a 9th-century BC reformer who created a dual monarchy and senate in Sparta that balanced the monarchy and popular assembly and approved all legislation. To solve the problems of poverty and social inequality in Sparta, land was divided up and redistributed fairly and equally. Simplicity in personal and household decoration became the norm; communal meals were introduced so that the rich, when obliged to dine with the poor, ‘could not make use of or enjoy their abundance, nor so much as please their vanity by looking at or displaying it.’⁴ Exercise, sometimes taken naked, was also communal. Married men and women slept separately, except when desiring intercourse. Lycurgus permitted relations between single men and married women with older husbands, but not other forms of adultery. Children were regarded as ‘not so much the property of their parents as of the whole commonwealth’.⁵ Those deemed unfit or unhealthy at birth were left to die on a mountainside. Educated in common, living in dormitories from the age of seven, shoeless, naked and with shaven heads, children were inured to climatic extremes, and were soon hardened to the necessities of military life.

Lycurgus (9th century BC)

The semi-mythical lawgiver, sometimes assumed to have been a member of the Spartan royal family, provided the city-state’s constitution and system of education. Virtually everything known of him derives from one source, Plutarch, writing in the 1st century AD, who himself tells us that his sources are dubious. Nonetheless, Lycurgus is supposed to have travelled widely in Asia and Egypt, studying different constitutions and modes of rule. Coming to power in Sparta, he created a constitutional balance between a group of kings and a senate, with a popular assembly possessing the power to ratify or reject whatever the former proposed, but not to legislate independently. Lycurgus rendered money valueless by abolishing silver and gold coinage and circulating only iron instead, which was too heavy to be practical and was not accepted elsewhere in Greece. Slaves were poorly treated, and there were restrictions on travel, with the aim of avoiding the corrupting influence of less virtuous societies.

Plutarch’s description of life in Sparta has become synonymous with bravery and self-sacrifice, but also with the militarized utopia (or dystopia), where individuality is sacrificed to the communal good and no price is deemed too high to secure submission to the demands of the state. Yet Lycurgus’s aim was not to create an imperial, militarist state, it was to keep Spartans ‘free-minded, self-dependent, and temperate’.⁶ His description would become crucial to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century, as well as to some socialists in the 19th century.⁷ And today the last closed communist society, North Korea, can be seen as inheriting aspects of this tradition.

Plato’s Republic (c. 370 BC) and Laws (c. 360 BC) also provided several possible models of utopian thinking that proved immensely influential through subsequent ages. One of his central propositions was that wealth concentrated in the hands of the ruling class would corrupt. In the Republic, as recounted by Plato, Socrates proposed that rulers should embrace a communal existence and avoid the pursuit of wealth, in return for which they would be maintained by the general population. Plato also described ritual festivals in which, as in Plutarch’s Sparta, the most robust males and females met. Their children were, again as in Sparta, to be reared communally and educated in the ethos of public service. The text commends rule by the philosopher–king – whose love of wisdom best qualifies him for the task – and explains why other regimes, such as oligarchy, or rule by the rich, timocracy, or government by the military, and democracy, or despotism by popular demagogues, are doomed to fail. In his Politics Aristotle rejected Plato’s communism, particularly community of wives and children, arguing that it would not lead to greater unity. He continued to call for private ownership but common use of goods and for education to create a viable sense of unity.

Plato (428/427–348/347 BC)

The Greek philosopher wrote the Republic and many other works. A native of Athens, he was a disciple of the greatest teacher of his day, Socrates, who was condemned for corrupting the morals of the young and committed suicide in 399 BC. After this, Plato left Athens, travelling widely over a number of years. He returned to Athens in 387 BC and, in a public olive grove on the edge of the city, founded his Academy. His preferred method of instruction was through dialogue, of which his Symposium and Phaedo remain among the best known. In Timaeus and Critias he offered an influential account of the former great empire of Atlantis. In the Republic, among other things, he developed two ideas that would remain profoundly influential throughout the subsequent utopian tradition: a plea for wise rule by a philosopher–king, and the maintenance of a ruling guardian caste that possesses community of both goods and wives. Plato also remains renowned for his theory that reality can be known only through pure ‘forms’, or ideas, accessible to the mind alone, material objects being mere reflections of these forms.

Rome, of course, would become the greatest empire of the ancient world. Like later imperial conquerors (and More’s fictitious Utopians), it regarded the imposition of its laws, customs and order on the barbarians as the greatest possible favour. Some Romans, such as Seneca, believed in an original, natural condition of human equality, though conceded its inevitable evolution into a controlled and civilized society. Many Roman versions of the earliest times, as formulated by writers such as Lucretius, downplayed any original advantages, instead pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Authors
• Other Titles of Interest
• Contents
• Preface to the paperback edition
• Introduction: The Search for Utopia
• 1 The Classical Age: Myths, Golden Ages and Ideal Constitutions
• 2 Christian Archetypes: Heaven And Hell, Millennium And Apocalypse
• 3 Extra-European Visions of the Ideal Society: Nowhere, Elsewhere
• 4 A Genre Defined: Thomas More’s Utopia
• 5 Paradise Found?: Voyages of Discovery to the New World and Beyond
• 6 The Age of Defoe and Swift: Satires and Desert Islands
• 7 Revolution and Enlightenment: America, France and Worlds Remade
• 8 Ideal Cities: Medieval to Modern
• 9 Utopia as Community: From Shakers to Hippies
• 10 The Second Age of Revolution: Socialism, Communism and Anarchism
• 11 Inventing Progress: Rationalism, Technology and Modernity as Utopia
• 12 The Emergence of Science Fiction: New Worlds Above and Beyond
• 13 Varieties of Dystopia: Totalitarianism And After In Satire And Reality
• 14 Utopia, Science Fiction and Film: The Final Frontier
• Conclusion: Paradise Lost?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Picture Credits
• Index
• Copyright